Omxplayer

Omxplayer is a video player specifically made for the Raspberry Pi's GPU made by Edgar (gimli) Hucek from the XBMC/Kodi project. It relies on the OpenMAX hardware acceleration API, which is the Broadcom's VideoCore officially supported API for GPU video/audio processing.

Raspberry Pi forum user spenning made precompiled binaries available on the forum. See here.

Streaming

RTMP

You do not need to download an MP4 file to watch it with Omxplayer. If you have the URL of a (H.264) rtmp:// stream, just stream it with:

omxplayer rtmp://...

To stream a (H.264) rtmpt://... URL with Omxplayer, just change the head rtmp:// to rtmpt://.

RTSP

Support for RTSP was added in 2012[1] (for instance, allowing the use of VLC media player as the streaming server).

Example:

omxplayer -o local rtsp://192.168.3.100:8554/stream1

Audio

It is possible to select the audio output by specifying -o or --adev on the command line between:

local: analog output

hdmi: hdmi output (hdmi_drive=2 is then required in config.txt)

both: both outputs

Example:

omxplayer -o hdmi file.qt

Troubleshooting

Black screen after playback

If you get a black screen on your X11 desktop after Omxplayer is finished, you can use this command to restore your view:

xrefresh -display :0

Or you can use a small Bash script for video playback to do this every time:

#/bin/bash
omxplayer "$@"
xrefresh -display :0

On Raspbian, xrefresh is part of the x11-xserver-utils package
(apt-get install x11-xserver-utils).

No rights to VCHIQ

On bare installations of the default distributions, Omxplayer often has insufficient permissions to access /dev/vchiq. One solution would be to run Omxplayer as root, but a nicer solution is to add a udev rule so that /dev/vchiq is also accessible from other users. To accomplish this, do the following under root: